


I'd Love to Hold the Sun (But I Can't Catch It)

by ask_the_birds



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst?, F/F, Friends to Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Road Trip!, also unrequited love that's actually requited the whole time!, angsting over the person you were and never will be again, big road trip!, literally road trip, love road trips, season three never happened, to escape danger! and find love???
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26264611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ask_the_birds/pseuds/ask_the_birds
Summary: Max and Jane used to be friends. Now, they don't talk anymore, and Max has made her peace with that- until Jane shows up at her door pleading with her to give her a ride. A trip that should be a few hours turns into a dangerous crosscountry adventure, and Max finds herself swept up again with a girl she'd decided to forget.or, gays trying not to be gay in a car for a very long time.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Comments: 17
Kudos: 55





	1. Max Doesn't Think Things Entirely Through

There was a girl on Max’s porch.

Max was paused in front of her car. She had driven from school, distracted the whole way by the crispness of the fall air and sky, and had been looking forward to a relaxing evening of doing her homework and thinking about a college essay she was probably never going to write. She had been so absentminded that she hadn’t even noticed  _ her _ until she’d closed her car door and started towards her front walk.

Jane Hopper had her eyes closed, her head laid back against the door. Her brown hair was messy, almost lank over her shoulders. Her arms and legs were outstretched, like a doll’s, and for a moment Max thought she might be dead. Questions bubbled up hot and half-formed why come to this place to die? Had she needed Max’s help? Max took a step towards her, terror spooling suddenly and vividly, but stopped when Jane raised her head and opened her eyes.

They stared at each other, a long and quiet moment. Max blinked, and then frowned. 

She walked across her lawn and stood before her own steps, not really looking at Jane. She thought Jane might spring to her feet, or to the side, or move at all, but she didn’t.

“Can you move?” Max asked. These were the first words she’d said to Jane in a long time- maybe even years.

“Max,” Jane said. Her voice was dry and clear, and she still sounded so young. “You’re home.”

Max squinted, still not looking at her. “I was at school. Weren’t you at school?”

She didn’t actually need to ask that because she knew Jane hadn’t been at school. At this stage in her peer’s lives, everyone was so terribly boring that someone ditching class for a day was juicy. The fact that it was  _ Jane _ skipping also might have contributed to this; Jane was always a popular topic of gossip.

“I didn’t go to school, Max,” Jane said. She sounded miserable, and Max snuck a glance at her to see if she actually meant it. Their eyes met, and Max forced herself not to look away again. 

“What do you want?” Max asked. She jangled her keys loosely, hoping Jane might notice and realize she was in her way. She did not.

“I need you to drive.”

“Drive,” Max echoed. She swallowed. “Doesn’t your boyfriend have a car?”

“Mike and I are not dating.”

“You’re always dating,” Max said. “Even when you’re not dating.”

Jane looked vaguely hurt, and for a moment Max forgot herself and felt bad, too judgy, too pushy. Dustin told her all the time that she jumped to conclusions, always thinking she was a step ahead of everyone.  _ It’s like you think that you have a comprehensive guide to human behavior that no one else has access to.  _

But this was Jane.

Max was allowed to judge Jane because she knew her, just a little bit better than all the idiots who gossipped about her.

“I don’t want Mike to drive me,” Jane said.

“Your dad then.” Max shook her keys again. “Move, please.”

Jane did, standing slowly. Unfurling herself. Max noticed that she was barefoot, and that she was wearing pajama pants and a sweatshirt. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Max asked, forgetting to stop herself. “Did you walk here barefoot? Where the fuck was Hopper?”

“At work,” Jane said, simply and unconcernedly. “I biked here.”

She pointed to somewhere on the lawn, and Max didn’t turn. Anger at Jane came so easily that her mind started mixing things up- suddenly, she felt mad that Jane was manipulating her, making her feel bad so she’d drive her somewhere. Why did Max have to drive her places? If Jane wanted a personal taxicab, she could have been a little more fucking civil for the past four years.

“Why are you so upset?” Jane asked.

Max stopped swelling with fury for a second, and exhaled hard. Her face was probably tomato-red, and she was already exhausted by the intensity of her own feelings. She hadn’t missed that- how  _ much _ Jane could make her feel, all the time.

Not that she missed her for anything else. She didn’t miss her, and she never had.

“I’m  _ not  _ upset. It’s just sort of concerning that you’re biking around barefoot. Anyway, I don’t care. I’m not driving you anywhere.”

Max slid past Jane and started fumbling her keys into the lock. It took too long, embarrassingly long. Long enough for Jane to put one of her hands on Max’s shoulder. She didn’t say anything, and Max wished she would. It would be less effective if she was pleading.

The door clicked open. Jane’s hand still rested on Max’s shoulder.

“Where do you even want to go?” Max asked, softly. She didn’t turn to look at her.

“Chicago.”

“Chicago!” Max yelped, flinching away from Jane. Jane stared at her like she was acting insane, which Max could understand. “That’s three hours.”

“Yes,” Jane said, squinting like she couldn’t understand what Max was getting at.

“You want me to drive you three hours to Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“And none of your friends can do it because…?”

“You are my friend.”

Max sighed. “Okay. I don’t really know what’s going on here, like, you’re trying to run away because you’re a teenager and teenagers run away in movies or something, but can I just say that it’s not a good idea? Because-”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Max shut up. Jane’s frown was so blisteringly intense that it almost made Max blush- but not quite.

Jane ran a hand through her hair, front to back. Her shoulders sagged, and Max saw again that old weariness, the weird and worldly way that Jane moved. She was the one who knew too much.

“Max, I need you,” Jane said. “Please.”

Clearly, Max hadn’t changed at all between freshman and senior year, because that was all it took. One clean swipe from Jane, and she was done. She’d do anything.

Max huffed. She opened her door halfway, and then looked back at Jane. “Fine,” she snapped. “Fine. Chicago. When?”

“Thank you,” Jane said, in the measured, smiling way a teacher might use on a student who hadn’t been following directions and had at last obeyed. “As soon as possible.”

“As soon as possible,” Max repeated. “Right. Right. Why not? It’s Friday.”

They were on the road in fifteen minutes. Jane refused to take anything, not even the shoes Max offered, which Max thought was highly suspicious. This whole  _ thing _ was highly suspicious- it was starting to stink like the shit they’d gone through when they were thirteen. Monsters from alternate dimensions, and things like that.

Max had asked Jane if that was what they were dealing with. “Something…  _ top secret _ ?” 

“No,” Jane said, staring at her unpainted nails like they were going to start displaying the time.

Max didn’t trust that, but she also wasn’t really looking to get involved. Besides, that was over, wasn’t it? Just some crazy shit that had faded into background noise, no longer relevant in her universe. Only in dreams did she even think about that Halloween, and those were few and far between.

Max really wasn’t curious about whatever was going on with Jane. She wasn’t even wondering what she was thinking, laying way back in her seat with her eyes closed.

She turned the radio on low and drank an old coke she’d found in her pantry as scenery ripped passed. The sky was still blue, and Max was fully capable of ignoring Jane, but… there was a part of her that felt sort of cheated. Wasn’t the car ride supposed to be the place where secrets were revealed? Where everything was splayed out in the open to examine?

She really never thought she’d talk to Jane again, much less have her in her  _ car _ . Still, Jane did whatever she wanted. She wasn’t really bound by the rules everyone else followed, except when she especially liked them.

The first hour passed, and neither one of them spoke.

She pulled over for gas halfway through the second hour. By then, the sky was getting darker and the scenery was getting harder to track. Max was a little worried she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to Hawkins with the signs darkened, but she was feeling weirdly unbothered by that.

As she pulled in to the station, Jane suddenly shot up from her seat and grabbed Max’s arm, startling her badly.

“What the hell?” Max said, steadying herself before she swerved into a pillar.

Jane’s eyes were wide and fearful, darting around the place like she’d never seen a gas station before. “What are we doing?”

“Stopping for gas?” Max said. “If you need to pee, we can-”

“No, no,” Jane said. “Just the gas and we’ll go.”

Max was creeped out by her behavior, but she didn’t really know what to do. Pulling in beside a pump, she decided that she was definitely going to start asking Jane what was going on, sometime in the next thirty minutes.

She headed into the tiny station to pay, watching Jane hunkered down in the car. Her arms were crossed over herself as if to give a tougher appearance, and it was unexpectedly endearing.

The next time Max looked up at her car, there were three men standing around it. 

She gaped. It had been, what, a minute since she’d last looked? The man was punching numbers into the register, but Max stammered at him to keep the change and dashed back outside, feeling frantic and at a loss for what to do. 

All three were tall. Separately, she wouldn’t have clocked them as potential threats- they just looked like farm boys hanging around a gas station. However, as they were making a triangular formation around her car -  _ her car!  _ The one she’d paid for herself, through odd jobs, and forced her friends to help her fix up last summer- she had to admit that they looked plenty threatening.

One knocked on the passenger window.

So they were after Jane. Who  _ they  _ were wasn’t clear, but Max knew in that moment that she had been really, really stupid to think everything was all over because it had been a few years.

“Excuse me!” she called, marching towards the man. She hadn’t decided what to do and had just done it- her mission was to get them away from her car. “That’s my car, excuse me!”

The farm boy- the  _ faux  _ farm boy, she realized, taking in his slightly off clothes, the artificial way he stood- looked up at her. He smiled, calmly.

“Apologies, Miss. We’d just like a word with your friend here. Can you have her step out of the vehicle?”

“My  _ friend _ there is paralyzed. She can’t even move her arms.” Max pointed at Jane, unnecessarily, hoping that her story was at least half convincing.

The man continued to smile, which communicated to Max very clearly that it wasn’t. Her heart rate sped up. What if he had a gun? What would she do if he threatened to hurt her? She had no weapon, no way to defend herself, and while she could run into the gas station, Jane was in the car, trapped-

On cue, in perfect time, all three men flew gracefully back away from the car. Max was so scared that this made perfect sense to her for a second- why wouldn’t they just be flying? Then she realized that it was Jane. 

Right, right, right. So Jane hadn’t been helpless the whole time.

There was a muffled yell from inside the car that might have been Jane telling Max to do something. Probably, Max guessed, she wanted her to run over and start the car. Get them both out of there.

She did what she was told.

She swung into the driver’s seat and shut the door a second after she saw one of the men start rising to his feet. She couldn’t gauge the damage Jane had done, but she imagined it was pretty bad, since it was slowing him down enough for her to ram the key into the ignition and start the engine.

“What the fuck!” Max said, high pitched and loud. “Oh shit! Fuck! Wait, the fucking gas thingy!”

“Drive, no, Max!” Jane commanded, and Max slammed the gas. The car shot forward, tearing free. She was addled, taking too long to turn, trying to figure out where they were and where they had to go. They screeched out of the station lot and onto the highway, heading north. A metallic ping sounded behind them, and it was either a gunshot or the car falling completely apart, stranding them out here with terrifying farm boy imposters that could kill them both.

Max put twenty miles of distance between them and the station before she spoke.

“So. That’s why you’re going to Chicago.”

Beside her, Jane buried her face in her hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything is pretty stressful right now, so instead of focusing on school I decided to again get swept up in a weird little love story with these two. Idk, the idea of being in a car driving off into the sunset is very appealing to me right now. Also I miss max!!! she's so dumb and lesbian and i wanted to write her again.  
> Thanks for reading, and stay safe!


	2. Jane Gets a Phone Call

Max was steaming mad. Jane thought that expression was sort of funny, because cartoons are the only place where steam would be pouring out of someone’s ears, but she wasn’t laughing right now. Neither of them were.

She didn’t know where they were, but it was dark and wooded. For all she knew, they were headed back to Hawkins right then, where Max would dump Jane on Hop’s porch and drive off.

The thought made Jane’s stomach burn. She closed her eyes again, and then opened them. If she closed her eyes, she felt like she might cry. And anyway, she wanted to see the  _ Welcome to Hawkins _ sign herself, if it was going to appear.

“So what?” Max asked.

“So what.”

“So what  _ was that _ ?”

Jane tilted her head from side to side, considering lies as if they were floating in front of her. She thought Max deserved the truth, but she also didn’t want to give it to her. Everything was shaking underneath her, shaking into bitter pieces.

“The lab,” Jane said at last. “Wants me back.”

“ _ The lab _ ?” Max asked.

Jane watched her hands on the wheel. She remembered Max’s hands like her own, sometimes, and she watched them tighten and loosen and skitter nervously over the surface of the steering wheel. So fidgety, she remembered.

“They called me.”

“They called you.”

“Repetitive,” Jane said, moodily. She didn’t want to talk about this.

“Sorry about that, just clarifying that the evil lab we fought when we were thirteen is giving you a ring.”

Jane shifted in her seat so she was facing the window. It was a dark blur, but she could see the moon, occasionally shining through the trees. She thought about opening the window and galloping into the woods, living with wolves or something. She’d seen that on TV, and the story had been so exhilarating she hadn’t been able to sleep, thinking about it. Why hadn’t she thought of that when she was twelve?

“Jane.”

The accusatory sound of her own name was very familiar to her, though usually it was “El”, from Hopper, two syllables, and “Eleven”, from Mike. If he was drunk he slurred it to “Leven”. 

Max was the only one who called her Jane, at least out of her friends. Of course teachers and classmates called her Jane- she introduced herself as Jane. They thought her middle name was Ellen or something, because Lucas and Mike barely even tried. Will called her Jane, but they barely talked anymore. There was an unspoken agreement between them, an animosity that Jane could identify but didn’t want to name.

Hadn’t she thought Will and Max were her best friends? Before freshman year, and during it, she thought they’d move to New York City together (New York City seemed the best place for them, the only place wide enough and fast enough for them).

“Jane,” Max said again, and there was a shred of concern there. “Are you okay? Just tell me what’s going on.”

“I already did.”

“Tell me what’s  _ actually _ happening. What do they want from you? Why are you going to Chicago?”

Jane’s head hurt. Her nose hadn’t bled when she’d thrown the men, but a slim pain had shot up into her skull like a needle. 

“I need my sister.”

“You have a sister?”

Jane rubbed her nose, then her eyes. The car rumbled in their silences, a suffocating kind of hum. “Yes,” she forced out, instead of letting the moment pass. Sometimes she went too slow, exhausted by the fact that people couldn’t pull her meaning from her mind. “She is like me.”

“Mind shit?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never brought that up before because…?”

“We fought. She wanted me to leave my friends.”

She remembered that moment, when Kali had her claws in her mind. When Papa had spoken to her, that terrifying voice she thought she would never have to hear again.

And she hadn’t. 

Until that morning.

“She wanted to kill,” Jane added, desperate to escape the thought.

“Which you’re morally opposed to.”

“They weren’t trying to hurt me. They had families.”

Max was quiet, maybe sensing that it wasn’t the kind of thing you joked about. At least she wasn’t crying- Mike once cried. Because she had killed people. He had been drunk, or maybe high, and he kept saying that she hadn’t needed to do it, that they were people doing their jobs.

She assumed he was talking about the ones she had blown the brains out of. Back when they had first met, when she had only known his kindness, his weirdness. All the love in her body went into loving him, saving him. And they all had guns, and she needed to save him, so she had. 

It had been unfair, to hold him as he cried. He, who had told her she wasn’t a monster. She could feel his hatred for her, then. He hid it so well, even from himself.

“So you need her. To kill the bad guys.”

“I need her to run away,” Jane said. “They’ll hurt my family, if I don’t run away.”

Kali had told her this would happen, that she could stay safe forever. They’d always want to find her. She’d never live a normal life, especially in that town. With those people.

They knew everything. That’s what Papa had said- “we know everything, Eleven. About the boy. About Chief Jim Hopper.”

Jane had been standing in her pajamas. She had been thinking about school and class, and here was this invader, this harshly unwelcome voice telling her that she should stay where she was, that she’d be found. She’d already been found. 

She looked around the cabin, panic hot and fierce, breathing too fast. Hop was gone to work. She was supposed to ride to school, where she had a Physics test she hadn’t studied for because she’d been frustrated and lethargic last night.

“Stay where you are, Eleven,” Papa said, and then the line went dead. 

“So you’re going to run away with no shoes on. Forever. Without saying goodbye to anyone.”

“They can’t follow me.”

“But I’m driving you.”

“The bus’s not safe,” Jane said. “They don’t know who you are. Just Dustin and Will and Lucas-”

“And Mike,” Max finished. “So. You needed someone who wasn’t on their radar.”

Jane nodded, not looking at her. She thought she might be mad, but she wasn’t sure it was right to apologize- she wasn’t sure she  _ wanted  _ to apologize. She wanted to be somewhere, anywhere but here. With Kali? 

The time she had spent with Kali hadn’t been safe. Or fun, exactly. It had been fun when she was twelve, she guessed. But in the way a dream is fun, until you wake up and realize that it wasn’t real and never could be real.

At least she wasn’t home. At least they knew she wasn’t home.

“Don’t take me back,” Jane said, quickly. “Please.”

“Jane, I’m not taking you back,” Max said, sort of half-laughing. She definitely didn’t think anything was funny. “It’s better for both of us that we get you to your sister.”

Jane nodded, not daring to thank her. 

“I mean, I don’t know where we are. I hope we’re heading towards Chicago.”

“Me too.”

“Ha,” Max said, and shook her head. “A fucking phone call.”

The car shot forward, away from Hawkins. Jane had always thought of her first journey to Chicago, the long bus ride back, the anxiousness to find Mike and Hop and her friends. Then, it had felt like there were strings tugging her away from Kali, irresistible. 

She was completely untethered now, from her home. From that girl riding the bus. It was like thinking about a character in a tv show. A friend that Jane knew well, but could never reach, never ask all the things she wished she could. She could just remember, and remember, and remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah sorry about unnecessary mournful Remembrances, they're my kryptonite- unfortunately there will be more bc there's no place better to think about life than a car.  
> i outlined this story, and i'm adding more gay subplots because why not. Also, this time im gonna try mike and will pov, so that's prob gonna be a bumpy ride (haha road trip humor!)  
> Thanks for reading and stay safe!


	3. Max Finds an Old Friend

The car slid through the darkness. Max had given up trying to beat the darkness, and she had already gotten herself half-lost trying to figure out an unexpected route to Chicago. She was defeated. And exhausted. Any energy she had been willing to figuring out what was going on between her and Jane had dissipated completely.

Jane was completely silent, staring straight ahead when her eyes weren’t screwed shut. She was going back and forth between these extremes instead of blinking, which was creeping Max out, but she didn’t want to chase Jane for conversation and also she didn’t care.

Now that the terms were laid out (Max was bringing Jane to Chicago and leaving her there, returning to Hawkins like nothing had happened), Max felt more relaxed. Nothing was expected of her beyond this point. 

Jane was exiting her life, forever. She was pretty sure that was what was happening, what was going to happen. She’d never see her again.

Was this how executioners felt? No, this wasn’t her fault. If Jane died, it wouldn’t be by her hand- not that she’d be  _ dying _ . No one was  _ dying _ . The creepy lab was just chasing them down to say hi. 

She swallowed and sped towards Chicago.

Pulling into the city was an experience, to say the least. Max hadn’t actually driven herself into Chicago before, just been once with Lucas and Dustin, when Lucas and Dustin were still her friends. Driving there now was terrifying. 

“Jesus!” she said, for the third or fourth time, as the cars around her jerked and juttered and honked. 

“Take the wheel,” Jane added, calmly.

“Thank you for clarifying,” Max said, hissing like a cat.

Jane didn’t answer. Her body thudded violently against the seat as Max made another quick, violent stop.

“Where the fuck am I going?” Max asked.

“You can drop me anywhere.”

Max cracked her neck. “I’m not just leaving you on a sidewalk.”

Jane reached over and touched Max’s shoulder. Max had, before this, resolved herself to never allow her brain to melt when Jane touched her again, but she shivered involuntarily.

“Let me go,” Jane said. “I can find her.”

Max didn’t look at her, which helped. With considerable effort, Max got the car over to the side of the street. She kept all her windows closed, but when Jane opened the side door to let herself out, the sounds of the city came flooding in, jarring and unwelcome. 

“You don’t have any shoes,” Max said, softly, as Jane swung herself out. She thought she wouldn’t hear her, but she still looked back. 

“Thank you for driving me.” 

“It wasn’t a problem,” Max said, even though it had been.

Jane smiled, sort of. Max knew most of Jane’s smiles, even now. There was her cardboard smile, the one she gave people who asked for it. There was her tough smile, which Max hated because it meant she was going to go try something she shouldn’t. There was also an open-mouthed, delighted smile, which Max hadn’t seen for years. She used to suspect it was only for Mike, and that had made her jealous and frustrated, but when Jane had at last smiled at her like that it had felt like the sun had cracked open over her head and was filling her up with light.

The smile that Jane gave Max now was none of those. It was tired, and adult. It looked like it had been sewn onto her face by different hands.

“Tell Hop I’ll miss him,” she said. “Send a letter.”

Max swallowed. “Okay.”

Jane reached over and squeezed Max’s leg, the kind of gesture of feminine affection that would have killed Max on the spot at fourteen, then she pulled away and slammed the door. She was walking away before Max could get her hand on the window crank.

Max didn’t know where to go after she dropped Jane. She thought about going back to Hawkins, but the thought sat like a stone in her gut, and she really just wanted to pretend that Jane was visiting a friend for an hour while she waited to pick her up. So she drove down streets until she found a neighborhood, and then she pulled over.

She could barely breathe in when she got out. Max was from California, so she had smelled her fair share of city air before, but there was always something overwhelming to breathing it in the first few minutes. Hawkins, she supposed, had changed her.

At first, living in a small, nowhere town was the worst thing she could have imagined. Even after she’d made friends, it had been difficult to forget how many things held her back there.  _ It’s like a mousetrap _ , she’d told Lucas once. He’d said something vague and positive, unable to respond the way she wanted him to. He almost never responded the way she wanted him to.

She started down the sidewalk, fall air blowing her hair back and away from her face. Lucas had been so nice to her, for so long. He hadn’t even been a bad boyfriend, at first, just sort of dumb and fumbling. And now he barely looked at her. It was better than being stared at, better than grabbing the attention of his douchebag friends beyond the occasional dyke joke or  _ does the carpet match the drapes? _ Maybe he was protecting her. God. She still felt sorry sometimes.

When she reached the end of the street, she found herself in the thick of things, and woefully underdressed for the chilly air. Jane must have been dying with no shoes on. Max wrapped her arms around her waist and kept her head down.

She walked two blocks like that, not really paying attention to what she was doing. After a while, she started to get the vague, uncomfortable feeling that she was being watched. She turned her head slightly and found that the street, which she had deemed suitably full, had thinned out. Two men were following her.

It was like she’d been doused in ice water. Max stumbled, nearly falling into someone in front of her. Without apologizing, she rammed past him and started speed-walking down the sidewalk. What could she do? Go back to the car? She had no grasp over the streets here, and she was terrified of leaving the street.

Desperately, she looked around for a store, and cut sharply into the first one she saw, something 24-7 and glowing.

For a few seconds, she thought there was no one inside, and she almost sobbed, but someone came clattering in from the back.

“One minute,” they said, and Max rushed over to the counter. The person did something with the boxes they had brought in from the back room, and then popped up in front of her. “What can I get for you?”

Max gaped. She had thought her luck was  _ bad _ , and the universe had just delivered to her the only person she knew in the entire city.

Robin’s face lit up. “Maximilian!” 

“Rob…” Max began, out of breath before she even began. She pressed a hand to her chest. When she gathered enough strength to straighten up, Robin was leaning over the counter as if they were back at Hawkins. Her surprise had flattened into mere excitement- nothing really surprised Robin.

“What are you doing here?”

“Chance,” Max choked out. “There were… men…”

She looked back over her shoulder, but the street was empty again. Her heartrate slowed. Had she mistaken them? They were just two guys walking down the sidewalk, and she was pretty sure Jane had taken care of the guys who had ambushed them before. Not to mention that Jane wasn’t even here.

“What men? Someone bothering you?”

“Actually,” Max said. “I think it was nothing.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Max looked back at her, taking in her dyed hair, the smudged makeup. She laughed, so relieved and confused she was almost delirious. “Hi.”

The circumstances, while undeniably weird, weren’t that strange. Max had promised to come up to visit Robin “when she got settled” sometime that fall, and it was her own forgetfulness that had let the connection between Chicago and her friend slip her mind. The fact that, minutes after leaving her car in a huge city, she ran into her closest friend, was probably a coincidence. No, definitely a coincidence. Even Jane couldn’t make Max meet Robin here.

“Hey.” Robin reached over and tapped her shoulder with her fist. Her voice was just as liquid and unaffected as ever, but she was smiling. “What are you doing up here?”

“I was driving Jane up,” Max said. 

Robin raised her pale eyebrows. “Oh. I didn’t know that was still going on.”

“It isn’t still going on. Nothing’s going on.” Max frowned. “Nothing ever was going on. Why are you asking me these things? I haven’t seen you in months.”

“Fine. How have you been? How’s  _ Hawkins _ .”

Max scratched her neck. She hadn’t actually known what she wanted to say. In all accounts it had been boring; she was so outside of the peripheral of standard popularity that she had no idea what was actually happening, of substance, to anyone else. That summer had been one of the most boring she’d ever had. She spent no time in her house, of course, but there was no Robin to go to anymore, so she just wandered around town. She avoided anyone and everyone she knew, reading or eating or walking in the woods.

“It’s the same. How’s Chicago?”

“Fast,” Robin said. “Loud. Better.” She pressed her palms flat to the counter, over which she leaned. “This is exceptionally weird. You said you were taking Jane up here? Give me a walk-through of your life over the past few hours.”

Max opened her mouth and paused. She couldn’t exactly tell Robin about the men who were chasing them.

She could barely tell Robin  _ anything _ . The faction of people in Hawkins who had their lives touched by the various supernatural threats they’d endured were all sworn to secrecy, even to their parents. That was what was so weird about Max now- she sort of thought that theirs was the kind of experience that couldn’t be shaken. As childish as it was, she’d thought they’d be connected forever.

“She wanted to come and see this friend she has up here,” she said. “I think she wants a little time away… from Hawkins.”

Robin’s eyes went slightly wider. “Shit! Don’t tell me she got knocked up?”

“No!” Max said, immediately, embarrassed by proxy. “Of course not. She’s just going through some shit.”

“Did she bring her boyfriend?” Robin asked. “Or her boyfriend’s boyfriend?”

Max smacked her, lightly, but she felt the rush of relief she always felt when she and Robin went back to joking. If anyone else had said something like that, fear would have made her throat close. She wouldn’t have been able to breathe. She’d brace herself for the same cruelty to be hurled towards her.

But it was just Robin, and Robin was always safe.

“Come on, Max, it’s a soap opera. You’ve been keeping up right?”

Max rolled her eyes. “I show up randomly, completely by chance, on your Chicago doorstep, and you want to hear about people who aren’t even me.”

Robin tilted her head and widened her eyes. “Yeah, well, you’re not as interesting as everyone else. You’re very boring. Please talk about someone else.”

When Max had Robin had first become friends, or the weird, quasi-friends that they had been at first, Robin had largely accepted a role in hearing Max rant. In the early days, Max had ranted a lot. She’d fly off on tangents, long-winded and dramatic, about whatever was bothering her most. Now, Robin revisited events in Max’s own life like old television episodes. She knew everything. She said Max had her fingers in the most interesting pies she’d ever seen, which was hilarious given how little she really knew about Max’s life.

But Max had nothing to tell her. She’d been so out of the loop that summer that she hadn’t even realized Jane and Mike were broken up.

“I haven’t been. I have a life outside of… gossip-mongering for you.”

“I thought  _ I _ was that life, Maximilian.”

“Give me a break.” 

“Max,” Robin whined, drawing the word out two syllables. “What’s happening with Jane Hopper? Does she still make your… no, does she make you feel lit up inside like a personal star?”

Max still couldn’t believe she’d told Robin that, but there was still the silly rush inside her chest because she could laugh about it and not be afraid. “No. I got over her a decade ago.”

“Liar. You are continually obsessed with her.”

“Where do you get that idea?” Max asked.

Robin’s eyes glinted. “Because you drove her to Chicago.”

Robin said that she didn’t want to keep her. She said this after they’d talked for two hours, but Max understood the sentiment. The night was lengthening, and Max’s mom probably already assumed she’d run away.

“Now that you know you drive to Chicago, you’re going to drive to Chicago all the time,” Robin told her. “That’s the forbidden knowledge. There’s no coming back from forbidden knowledge.”

“Why would I want to come here if there was a chance I could see you?” 

“Well Jane Hopper will be up here too.”

“You’re so ridiculous,” Max said, trying to frown. “I could do better.”

“But she’s such a goddess!” Robin said, clasping her hands and blinking her eyes. After a few seconds of whimpering, she dropped the act. “That was you.”

“I know.”

“I was imitating you.”

“I got it.” Max pulled on the collar of her jacket and sniffed. “I guess I’ll go home now.”

It wasn’t so scary to think of it, after having seen Robin. Talking to her for hours about the tiny migraines of her life in the city, about being an adult and having a large life to fill, distracted Max enough that she stopped worrying about Jane. She didn’t have to worry about Jane. It wasn’t her job anymore.

“Aw, don’t be glum, Maximilian. Life is boring when you’re eighteen.”

“Seventeen.”

“That’s the same age.” Robin spread her hands like starbursts on the counter and bobbed her head. She did things like that without thinking about them at all, like she forgot she wasn’t alone. Once, she said Max felt like her little sister, or a younger version of herself. “Get out of here. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you.”

“Maybe,” Max said. She started walking towards the door, and then threw up one of her hands to wave without turning. This was an inside joke between them- when Max was younger, she had found this move insanely cool. Robin cackled as the door shut behind her.

It was now darker and emptier on the street, but Max felt bundled up, like Robin was still beside her. Her head was pleasantly blank, her cheeks flushing from cold, her shoes scuffing along the pavement.

For the first time in hours, Max was not worried about Jane Hopper. In fact, she was glad that they weren’t together. She didn’t really want to have to deal with terrifying lab associates any more tonight.

She had only taken about ten steps away from the shop when a pair of hands grabbed her by the arms and yanked her back.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's funny that this slice of the story is, like, not a road trip at all, because I'm literally on a road trip right now. I've gone through seven states! LA just had one of the hottest days on record, and it's snowing in Colorado- feels like a total alternate universe.  
> Anyway, this chapter is not my favorite (tbh i always take ten times longer to write robin, her voice is sort of hard to pin down) but i liked to sort of dip into the relationship between Max and robin because i feel like i live that queer mentor to best friend thing and write what you know i guess?  
> To conclude: thanks for reading and stay safe!


	4. Jane Does Not Find an Old Friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heads up, people are killed in this chapter! it's not graphic, just mentioned, but if you don't wanna read that i'd recommend skipping the last six paragraphs (starting with Jane strode towards the vans)

It should have been easier.

The first time Jane had found Kali, she’d done it in just an hour. She hadn’t known where she was or what she was looking for exactly, and she was too dumb to worry about anything she saw or heard. 

It took her hours, now. She walked the streets, bare feet going numb almost as soon as they touched concrete, and willed herself to find her. 

Her powers should have drawn her to her sister, no- that wasn’t exactly how it worked. Max used to ask how she did the things she could, her face so sunny and irresistible that Jane had tried. She’d told her that it was like being a cold, dark, place, from which there were threads to every place around the world. Jane could walk in this place, and pick up threads and follow them, and that let her see them, or sense them. Feel them.

Max had laughed at that and told her that sounded like a horror movie, and Jane had smiled in relief because she hadn’t explained it right. It was, to her, both a perverse twisting and a dulled down mockery of it. Not properly beautiful, but not properly terrifying either.

For a moment, she missed Kali so desperately that it hurt. This feeling would overtake her when she was at her most lonely, because Kali, to her, was the only one in the whole world who could understand what she felt. 

And she should have been close. She should have started to recognize her surroundings, feel the hum in her chest when she started to close in. But she wasn’t.

Where was she? Where was  _ Jane _ ? Defenseless, alone in Chicago?

Hop would be so disappointed in her. He’d be angry, but underneath it he’d be disappointed. He raised her better.

Jane felt desperation start coming up like bile, but she focused on moving forward, taking in her surroundings. Everyone, she noticed, was looking at her. 

Oh, the shoes. And the pajamas. Max must have thought she was crazy- Jane had forgotten what was acceptably weird, the weird that Mike used to find so endearing, and what made her look like she was still stumbling through the woods. She should find shoes- no, she should find Kali.

No. She should find Max.

The idea of seeing her again right now made her so relieved she was actually disgusted with herself. She had already put Max in danger by even asking her to come here, and Max was  _ angry _ at her. But she wanted her anger like she wanted her face and her firm hands on the wheel. She wasn’t good at parsing out the pieces of Max that she liked because she used to love all of it.

No, she couldn’t go back to Max. Max was probably back in Hawkins by now, or on her way. Jane kept going.

The city was large and dark, everything looking down on her. She stopped three times to rub the warmth back to her feet, avoiding the eyes of anyone who passed, and once tried to reach Kali behind closed eyes. A man had shouted something at her, slurred and surreal, and Jane had run a few streets, ignoring the way the soles of her feet burned.

Two hours passed her by, and made the air even more cold. Jane rubbed her eyes over and over again, but the wind kept her cheeks damp with tears. And her nose was running. She hoped she wouldn’t catch a cold.

She came through the warehouse that she had found them all, so long ago, and found it deserted. The roof was cracked, and it felt colder inside than out.

Jane went up the stairs to look at the room she had stayed in. There was no more bed, no more furniture at all. Someone had spray painted on the wall, but the words were curved and confusing, and Jane’s head hurt. She crouched, head in her knees, and tried to catch her breath.

She didn’t need static, like she had when she was younger. Closing her eyes and focusing was enough.

She was somewhere else, then. Darkness, soundlessness. She couldn’t feel her body, and this made it the loneliest place, because even her mind was without partner, without her blood and skin and muscle. 

_ Kali _ , she thought at the void, and the void answered. There she was, sitting down, sitting somewhere with her hands clenched in front of her. Fighting? No. Her face was grim, but she wasn’t angry. She was driving.

Then, Kali did something strange. She closed her eyes and spoke.

“Jane,” she said. “I know you’re here.”

If Jane had eyes, they would have widened. Kali didn’t look at Jane, because Jane wasn’t there, but she said, again, “Jane. You have to get out of there.”

_ Out of where? _ she thought at her, but she wasn’t sure if she heard her.

“Leave your policeman and your friends and run. They want to find you, and take you, and they’ll hurt them to get you. You have to run.”

_ I already have. _ She didn’t think Kali could hear her. Was she just sensing her in her mind? 

“Meet me in Los Angeles,” Kali continued. “We can stay there for a while. Jane, you have to run.” She looked up, as if Jane was floating above her like an angel. “Can you hear me?”

Panic was making Jane’s concentration waver. Kali slipped away from her, and she felt her mind start to sink back into her body. Not yet! She had to tell her that she couldn’t go to Los Angeles, or she needed some time to figure exactly how to walk there barefoot- or she needed Max.

And without even wanting to, she was thinking about how perfect it would be if Max sailed in in her big car and told her to climb aboard. It was so brief. But it was enough to make her think about her, and then she was watching her.

Jane wasn’t able to understand at first what she was seeing. Max was crunched up, her hands behind her back. She was looking out in front of her, brows drawn together almost comically. She was shaking, but Jane didn’t know why- was she cold? Scared? In movement?

When Max spoke, it frightened her. For a moment, she thought she was talking to her, as Kali had done, but what Max said was, “no, she’s not here.”

Jane watched as her eyes moved. She was watching someone! Who was she watching?

“She left. After your guys found us- I didn’t know she could do that. I thought she was just some girl.”

Her eyes got bigger, which meant she was lying. Jane realized that she was talking about  _ her _ \- about Jane.

“I’m telling the truth!” Max said. “I swear! She’s not in Chicago.”

Jane was horribly reminded of the night she had run away, after coming from the Upside Down. She had watched Mike through a window, watched him tell them he didn’t know where she was. Then, he hadn’t really known, and they must have known that, but Max did know. 

For the first time, it occurred to Jane that maybe they knew who Maxine Mayfield was. And it was a thought that destroyed her.

She didn’t know exactly where Max was, but she knew she was in the city. Even as she ran from the warehouse, she could feel her, somewhere ahead. Stalling for a moment, Jane chose left and began to run. 

She was barely aware of what she was doing. Blocks flew past her, yielding to the pull in her gut, the feeling that she was heading somewhere to where Max was. She heard, distantly, someone honking, and she thought she might have gotten in someone’s way, but she couldn’t consider it.

The city was lost to her long before she arrived at her destination, and she could only mark was directly in front of her. Dark parking lot. Two street lights, and one blown out. There was one broken brown truck in some corner, and then, obscenely obvious in the center of the lot, three white vans.

They were blank. But she knew well enough who they belonged to.

Fear and rage opened in her, sudden and in direct conflict. Jane didn’t give herself time to weigh them. Instead, she seized them like weapons and started twisting.

Kali had been the one to teach her how to treat her emotions like fuel. She’d told her to use her anger to her advantage. Jane had done the rest of the work herself. When she was fourteen, she had forced herself to train, terrified she’d have to face another threat to her and her friends. There, freezing and alone in the woods at night, she’d figured out that it didn’t matter what she drew on, as long as it was strong. She killed mosquitos with love for Mike, for Hopper and Joyce and Will, until she couldn’t stand. It felt better, more wholesome. After a few months, she tried squirrels, snapping tiny necks without even having to raise her hands. She’d cried for hours afterwards.

These weren’t squirrels, though. Later, Jane would hate herself for that thought, but she still had it. They weren’t squirrels, and they had Max.

She could feel bodies, nine of them. Two in two vans, and five in the other. So that was it.

Jane strode towards the vans, her lungs working like bellows. The two vans were easy- she flicked her middle fingers against her thumbs, and they flipped. One arched high and landed almost where it had originally stood, but the other cartwheeled and skidded to the other side of the lot. Her aim evidently needed work. No one got out of either car, either because the doors were crushed in or because Jane had killed them. She didn’t think about it.

She didn’t notice the twin crashes, but they must have been loud, because almost immediately after their landing, the doors slid open along the side of the van. 

Two men. One had on a blue suit. Both had guns. Jane didn’t know what to twist to make them explode, or break, so she just reached out and took them.

This was the hardest part to describe. How she could flip vans and heat brains to soup, and also reach out and  _ take _ things. How she could sense things, hear things, see things she shouldn’t have been able to. Everything was in contradiction, to the point where she didn’t understand most of it. Max joked once that if she found out Jane could time travel tomorrow (tomorrow  _ then _ , which was yesterday now) she wouldn’t be surprised at all. 

Always a joke. Jane threw the guns to the street side of the parking lot and watched the men approach. The little light that fell on them illuminated their fear, their hesitation. Because she was an eighteen year old girl in pajamas? Or because they saw what Max and Hopper and Joyce and Will had never been able to? 

To Max, Jane’s powers were a joke, something friendly and funny. Jane closed her eyes and felt the meat and bone of the men who came towards her. Without even raising her hands, she blew their brains out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yep she's pretty short, and the next one will also be short and probably up by tomorrow.  
> I did take a few liberties with Jane's powers yeah yeah. I didn't really think she was in a giant empty room just walkin around and stuff though, and that would be boring to describe, so whatever. Also, the way Jane's powers developed... honestly she just seems to get more and more powerful and this takes place about four years after season three (although reminder: s3 did not happen in this) and her power development from s1-s2 was fighting one monster from the Upside Down to fighting the Upside Down so... I believe it could happen.  
> After this and the next chapter I'm finally going to get to Will and Mike... hoo boy that's going to be WACKY. Let's just say that someone is very deep in the closet, and it's not me in eighth grade ahahah  
> Thanks for reading and stay safe!


	5. Max Makes Life Choices

For a captive, Max was doing pretty well.

When it came to being kidnapped, she had to admit she was a newbie. But when it came to being interrogated she had experience. She couldn’t remember the last time she had told Neil where she had actually been, and she had actually compiled an entire catalogue of fake friends to call on. “Georgina from the swim team” was her favorite. In an alternate universe, Max and Georgina from the swim team were secretly dating.

She couldn’t come with anything so detailed on such short notice as being yanked into a van and restrained by two men in lab coats, but she thought her lying was still pretty good. She had picked a story and stayed with it, even elaborating on a specific stretch of road she’d allegedly left Jane on. Her interrogators, both wearing too-normal city clothes, were too poker-faced for her to tell if she was convincing them, but she thought she couldn’t be doing too poorly.

Her hope started to fade when they stopped driving and the man in the blue suit got out of the vehicle. Something about the mood in the van was shifting from her favor, she thought.

After about five minutes, Max shifted in the seat and cleared her throat. She was afraid, but she had shoved that out of sight for Jane’s benefit as long as possible. 

“Give it to me straight, doc,” Max said to the labcoat man on her right. “Am I going to be discharged any time soon?”

She thought it was sort of funny, but her delivery was flat. The man didn’t answer.

Blue Suit got back in the car. He seemed to be the one in charge here, which was probably why he got to wear the fake suit and the other fake citygoer had to wear a boring fake regular outfit.

He smiled. “Is Jane Hopper in Chicago?”

So blunt. Max was startled by how quickly he jumped back into it. She didn’t let anything show on her face.

“No. No, she’s not here.”

Blue Suit raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“She left. After your guys found us- I didn’t know she could do that.” She swallowed. “I thought she was just some girl.”

There was a silence. Blue Suit closed his eyes and tilted his head, like he was incredibly tired. “Don’t lie,” he said.

“I’m telling the truth!” Max said. “I swear! She’s not in Chicago.”

“Maxine Mayfield,” he said.

Max didn’t flinch. She stared straight into his face and willed herself not to cry.

“Resident of Hawkins, Indiana, residing with your mother and stepfather. You are a known affiliate with Eleven, or, as you know her, Jane Hopper.” He glanced down at his hands, where he held three developed photographs. “It would not be a good idea to deny any of that right now, Maxine.”

The photographs were of Hopper’s porch. The first was one of her and Jane’s earliest meetings. They sat a bit apart on the bench Hopper had put out there. Max’s arms were crossed, and Jane was slumped over. The second was from later. Jane’s hair was longer, and she was letting Max braid it. Her face was puzzled, and screwed up in concentration, as if she could absorb the knowledge without looking. The third couldn’t have been a month later. Jane had her face pressed into Max’s shoulder. They were holding hands.

Max couldn’t breathe, for several reasons. 

“We’ll ask you again,” Blue Suit said. “Where is Jane Hopper?”

Max shook her head. “You photographed her house?”

“Answer the question.”

“You knew where she was the whole time.”

“Maxine.”

Her head was spinning. “What the fuck have you been doing? Why even let her live there?”

The man leaned close. She could smell his breath- medically clean. “Maxine. No one here wants to hurt you. Where is Jane Hopper?”

Max shook her head, but everything was going slower. How much did they know? What sort of game were they playing with Jane? She had never known the deatils of Jane’s freedom, but Hopper had always been so certain she was safe from this, from all of this.

There was a crash, and then another.

Everyone in the van jumped. Blue Suit looked to his left, but there was no window there. “Shit!” he hissed, and slid the door open. Normal Clothes leaned down and pulled out two guns, bigger than anything she’d seen Neil take hunting.

“No!” Max gasped, but they were both out of the van before she could do anything. Even then, she couldn’t do anything. The labcoats held her fast, and the door was shut. 

“Fuck!” Max writhed, kicking at their shins and trying to reach back to bite them. “Fuck you! Jane!”

Metal crunched, close. Max went still, suddenly afraid, and watched the door peel away like the top of a soup can. 

She regained her senses before either of the labcoats could. Their fingers, limp with terror, were easy to slip out of then, and she almost smacked into the seperation window from the excess force of her escape. Instead, only one hand hit it, and she propelled herself out into the city air.

Jane was there, hand outstretched. Her nose was running red, her eyes wide and furious.

Max crashed into her, just enough to feel that she was solid. Her hands briefly went to her shoulders. She felt Jane’s hand ghost along her back. She thought Jane might have whispered her name.

Then she pulled away. “Let’s-” she began, and immediately ran out of breath. In lieu of completing her response, she pointed. Randomly. They were in a parking lot, she realized. A parking lot with two bodies-

No. Not then. She couldn’t-

She began to run towards the far end of the lot, trusting Jane to follow. She could hear the labcoats coming out of the van, perhaps slower than they would have if Jane wasn’t there, and they were out on the street before they could give chase. 

By  _ foot _ . It took less than ten seconds before Max heard the revving of the engine and realized the van was starting after them.

She couldn’t stop, but she half-turned and yelled, “Jane!”

And she watched her stop.

Wind ripped past them, tossing Jane’s hair like a flag. She held out her hand and flicked. That was all it took.

The van launched into the air. Max had never seen anything like it- it left the ground and flipped over and over, like slow motion, and crashed a few feet ahead of her on the street. 

The sound was so loud that she screamed. She clamped her hands over her ears, heart beating so fast she couldn’t think. Bile rose, and she was barely able to put thoughts as to why.  _ Dead- the labcoats- _

She felt Jane’s hand on her forearm, not gentle. She was yanked along, deeper into the city, and they ran without having to say that the threat was entirely dispatched.

They found Max’s car in an hour. She wanted to go back to Robin’s store, but the lights were off when they reached it, and she wasn’t sure what she would have said. It was best that she not get involved anyway.

When she slid into the driver’s seat, she went on autopilot. She took random roads, aimless, until they were on a freeway heading west. That was when Jane finally spoke.

“Max,” she said, carefully. “Did they hurt you?”

“No,” Max said, immediately. “You?”

Jane leaned back against the seat. “Of course not.”

The silence threatened to stretch again, but Max couldn’t let it.

“What are we going to do?”

“Drop me-”

“No, Jane.” Max stared ahead, eyes sore. The road was dark, flanked by more darkness on both sides. “They know my name. And they know we… were friends. They showed me pictures of your house. They- oh God.”

Max pulled onto the side of the highway, where there was enough packed dirt to keep the car from rolling into a ditch. If a truck came ripping by, they’d be thrown in anyway. She leaned her head on the steering wheel.

“It’s going to be okay,” Jane said, in a voice that suggested she was very frightened and at a loss for what to do.

“They’ve been stalking you for  _ years _ ,” Max said, into her hands. She wanted to cry, but the sobs were stuck in her throat. “They showed me pictures from when we were fourteen… they never left you alone. I’m so sorry.”

She cut herself off, and managed one, dry sob. She couldn’t imagine what Jane must feel.

“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry, Jane.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

Max sat up, sharply. “Fuck no, it’s not! What the fuck are we going to do?”

Jane was looking at her, half deer-in-the-headlights, half wise beyond her years. Always contradicting herself. She reached over, and put her hand on Max’s shoulder. Max hadn’t realized she was shaking- she hadn’t even realized that she, herself was.

“Max,” Jane said, in a non-voice. She breathed it. Max understood that she was also barely holding it together.

Max took four deep breaths, and then swallowed, hard. “Okay. Let’s think about this. Let’s work it out.”

Jane nodded, not taking her eyes off of Max.

“We can’t go home,” Max said.

“No.”

“Where can we go?”

Jane bobbed her head. “Los Angeles.”

“What?”

“Los Angeles. That’s where my sister is. She told me to find her there.”

Max stared at Jane. There was no light here, but she still saw when her face cracked open in a delirious smile. She was smiling too, before she could help herself, and started to laugh. She put her head back on the steering wheel.

“Los Angeles…” Max said. “With no fucking shoes on.”

“They’re overrated,” Jane said, and Max smiled, secret, into her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok ok the next chapter is going to feature the Boys, and then that'll be sort of the "part one?" There are four parts, if that gives you an idea of the length of this heheh.  
> If you couldn't tell I'm not the best at writing action scenes, so there will be a lot of mooning and pining and talking about not mooning and pining coming up in lieu of epic fight sequences. Although there are at least three other epic fight sequences to look forward to? If that's your thing?  
> Not sure when the last one will be up, but probably some time later in the week bc whoop I have two tests in two AP classes <3 <3 and I haven't studied yet.  
> As always, thanks for reading and stay safe!


	6. Will and Mike Take a Walk

“You don’t have to go,” Stacey pointed out.

She was standing over Will as he put his shoes on, the porch creaking under her feet. Inside, they could hear the movie they’d been watching play on, accompanied by Tim’s high-pitched screech of a laugh.

“I have to go.”

“You always go.” Will watched her shadow as she reached up to scratch her nose. “He never comes.”

“I never ask him to come.”

“Right.” Stacey crossed her arms. “Because he’s useless.”

“He’s fragile.”

“What is he, a plate? Friendships are give and take, William.”

Will sighed. He could respond in a number of ways, all of which he had tried before. One thing about being friends with Stacey was that she was never easy, the way it had been easy with his old friends when he was twelve. She saw through him. It was relieving, in a way, to know that she could see through him and still like him, but it wasn’t easy by any means.

“Well, I’m going to go no matter what you say,” he said, standing. “So…”

“I shouldn’t try, right, right.” Stacey fixed him with a glare. “I should just tell your mom where you went.”

“Yes, that is exactly right.” Will gave her a thumbs up. She shook her blonde hair out of her eyes and fixed her with the most effective look in her arsenal: genuine concern.

“He’s going to kidnap you one of these days,” she said. “You and that poor girlfriend of his are going to get into his creepy van and he’s going to drive you off into a secret colony or something.”

“That’s a groundless assumption.”

“He’s so  _ creepy, _ Will,” Stacey said. “He comes to school in sunglasses.”

“Because he’s hung over.”

“That is not better. Do you see how that is not better?”

Will sighed, waggled his hands. “I understand and accept your concern. But we’ve been friends since we were five, and I’m not going to drop him when he needs me.”

“He doesn’t need you. He hangs on to you like a leech.” Stacey grabbed Will’s shoulders and shook him, which made him laugh a little. She opened her mouth as if to continue, and then pressed her lips together. Will took her meaning to be that she wanted to bring up “the way she found him”. Stacey said she hated to bring up their first meeting, in sophomore year, but she was always bringing it up during these kinds of arguments.  _ Do you even remember how miserable you were when I found you? Who was the one who did that, Will? _

He usually said, “I did.” 

It was true, wasn’t it? He could have walked away a lot time ago, if he really wanted to. He had friends now, friends who listened to him and appreciated him. If anyone was leeching, it was Will. 

“I’m going,” he said. “Do tell my mom.”

“Hm.” Stacey let him go and shook her head. “Okay.”

He turned away from her so her baleful eyes wouldn’t stop him and made his way towards the forest. Mike had told him to meet him at “the spot”. This was, to Mike, an abandoned and destroyed kid’s clubhouse Will had happened upon in their junior year. To Will, it was the remnants of a castle. He couldn’t bring himself to explain its relevance to him, or to Jane. For all he knew, they’d been having secret sex in there, and Mike would probably be angry if he told him. Or sad. Mike was difficult to predict, this day and every day.

In any case, Will knew the way in the dark, and it didn’t take him long to find the place. There was Mike, sitting on the collapsed, rotting wood with his head thrown all the way forward. Sometimes, Mike looked like a greek statue, like something from an art museum, especially when he had his hair grown out. 

He looked up when he heard Will approaching, and the spell was broken. He was drunk, of course. He had basically lived drunk the whole summer, but Will had thought school would knock some sense into him. 

Several things gave him away. For one, Mike was a theatrical drunk. He had gotten thinner and longer as the years progressed, and he was terribly uncoordinated while inebriated. Right now he had his legs stretched all the way in front of himself, like a puppet waiting for strings to hoist him up. Secondly, his face was all-the-way red. Thirdly, he had the stupid little flask he snuck his dad’s liquor in. Will had no idea where he had gotten it, and neither did Jane, and both of them hated it with a passion.

“El broke all the way up with me,” Mike said, instead of a greeting.

“All the way?” Will said, approaching. He stood to his side, afraid that if he stood in front of him he would lurch over and throw up on his shoes. This had occurred twice before.

“Yeah.” Mike started tapping his flask frenetically on the wood. “I think all the way.”

Will rolled his eyes. Mike didn’t pay nearly enough attention to him to notice it, and Will knew that they were  _ not  _ all the way broken up. They never were. 

There were four incidents where Mike and Jane went through rough patches. The first was during freshman year, the second during sophomore first semester, then again that summer, and then at the end of junior year. During that entire time, only the freshman break-up had any substance to it. That was around the first time Will ever saw Mike totally fall apart, and he doubted that he had put himself together properly afterwards because there were parts of him he just hadn’t seen since. Maybe they were lying around somewhere, forgotten, or maybe Mike had decided to abandon them, but one thing was clear. Mike had, either gradually or entirely four years ago, started to hate everything.

Actually, not everything. Just the important things: his family, Max, Dustin, Lucas, Jane, Will, and himself.

“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” Will said.

“We won’t.”

“Sure you will.”

“Will  _ not _ .” Mike drank. “Will, will not.”

“That’s really funny.”

“She left me a  _ note _ in my  _ basement _ .” Mike gesticulated, suddenly. “Why did she do that?”

Will sighed and put his hands in his pockets. It was starting to get cold. “I don’t know, Mike.”

“Do you wanna know what it said?”

Will didn’t respond. When Mike asked a question, he didn’t want an answer. Even  _ what do you want for dinner? _ was sometimes rhetorical with him.

“It said  _ we should break up from now on. _ ”

It was cryptic coming from anyone else, but Jane had probably asked Hopper what was a way to say “ongoing” or something. It was definite, but Will still didn’t really believe it.

“Any idea why?” Will asked.

“No!” Mike said, almost before Will had finished talking. “I don’t know why…”

He trailed off. Will didn’t interrupt him, hoping that he’d come to some conclusion and let Will take him home. For a moment, he considered taking him home to his place, instead of letting his parents catch him drunk, but he realized that Stacey was probably expecting that and did not want to see her expression if he did. 

Then, Mike launched to his feet. Will startled, surprised he was attempting to move. For someone who got drunk as often as Mike did, he was surprisingly embarassed by it. But Mike was walking, or, stumbling, off and away from Will, his bike, and the collapsed castle.

“Mike?” Will called after him.

“I’m going to go- go talk to her,” Mike said. He lost his footing for a moment and teetered, then righted himself. Will jogged after him, knowing that if he tripped and fell he would most likely crack his head open on a rock.

“I have a telephone at my house,” Will suggested. He walked beside Mike, ignoring the way he reeked, and prepared himself to make a last-minute save. 

“In person,” Mike explained.

Will frowned and tried to come up with a logical way to explain that Jane would not be happy to see him and he should definitely not do that. Mike was impossible to reason with, drunk or not. If Will tried anything, it would most likely just end up backfiring on both of them. All he could do was follow him and try to make sure he didn’t say anything too bad.

The forest got darker and darker the longer they walked, and Mike took two times as long as he normally would have. It was lucky that Will’s house was close to the cabin in the woods, because otherwise they would have been walking until morning.

Will said nothing the whole time. He couldn’t think of anything to say, and he also didn’t like to hear Mike slur and stammer and say stupid things. The more he heard it, the less he remembered the way he used to talk when he was happy, and when he was sad or angry or feeling good. 

This did not stop Mike from talking, though. He occasionally said something about how he didn’t understand why she had done this, or something about what he was going to ask her (which was never made clear beyond, ‘I’m going to ask her… and she’ll listen…’. Will didn’t like it, and if he didn’t know that Mike had no stomach for confrontation he would be worried.

If Will were to talk to Mike, he might tell him that he was probably better off this way. He clearly wasn’t happy dating Jane. He knew that. He clung to her, sort of like how Will clung to Mike.

If Will hadn’t come to this forest this afternoon, would Mike have still gone after Jane?

Maybe if there wasn’t someone constantly around to witness his gleaming, firey descent into madness, Mike wouldn’t act the way he would. Of course, Will couldn’t prove that. He couldn’t leave him alone.

Hopper’s house was dark when they found it, brooding a little darker than the surrounding trees. Night had really fallen, and Will should have turned them around a while ago, but he got caught up. Mike had one of his hands wrapped around Will’s wrist and was leading him forward, and Will was distracted by that and distracted by trying not to be distracted by that. Seeing Jane’s house reminded Will, suddenly, that this was all a very bad idea.

“Mike,” he said. “I don’t think we should wake them up if they’re sleeping.”

Mike made a frustrated noise. “She doesn’t sleep. Has nightmares.” He let go of Will’s wrist and started rubbing his face.

Will rolled his eyes. Mike always acted like Will and Jane were strangers, like they hadn’t once snuck into the costume shed after the musical in sophomore year and stayed up all night, terrified of being caught and too proud of themselves for hiding away. Jane single-handedly took out half to rumors that Will was queer, by appearing friendly enough to be a potential girlfriend and also through physical force.

“It’s not a good idea.”

“Get off me,” Mike complained, and Will jumped back, even though he hadn’t even really been touching him. “Shut up. Why’d you let me come?”

“I didn’t. You just started going.”

Mike cupped his hands around his face. “Eleven!” he yelled.

His voice was too loud, way too loud. It was like the forest had gone completely silent, like every creature and bug that would normally be making their own racket was watching Mike perform. Will got goosebumps, suddenly. He was eerily reminded of the way he had felt when he knew that terrible thing was nearby when he was thirteen-

“Mike,” he said. “Stop. We need to go.”

“Leven!”

Will was sure it was nothing- his mind was playing tricks on him. The danger here was Hopper coming out with a baseball bat and bashing Mike’s head in. He approached Mike cautiously, hands up. Mike wasn’t even looking at him.

“Mike, come on. Let’s go.”

“I don’t wanna go,” Mike said, and he finally turned towards him.

Something strange happened. Mike’s eyes bounced off of Will and to something behind him. His mouth was already hanging open, but his glassy eyes got a little wider. He extended his hand and said, simply, “oh.”

Someone grabbed Will from behind. 

He instinctively went limp- if someone grabbed him at school it was easier not to struggle, and usually less embarrassing- but a second later he realized what he was doing and started thrashing, kicking. He fell halfway down, and Mike said, “no don’t!”, but Will didn’t have the time to look over and see if anyone was apprehending  _ him _ because Will was being hit very hard over the head.

His last thought was not so much a linear idea rather than the sudden, vivid memory of Stacey’s disappointed face, her voice saying, “you’ll get hurt if you keep hanging around him.” 

And then maybe he did have one more last thought, which was that he was really going to slap Mike when and if he ever came to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God I hate Mike so fucking much. I was going to just cut him out, but I realized that a) I really wanted Will, and he made for a really juicy side character in the drama and b) I'll be writing a very similar character (namely, massively repressed dumb idiot) come November in my nanowrimo project, so might as well give him a spin. Ugh. I honestly don't know if the way I write Mike is even correct bc I literally have never read mike/will or whatever their ship name is in my life. If you're reading this still (and you haven't decided to click off in a rage after this unsolicited negative opinion) rec me some good ones. I trust you guys... yeah I trust you guys. Also, love when y'all comment, it makes my whole day.  
> Man, can't believe I wrote Mike. I mean, technically I wrote Mike in Nothing Can Fall and he had a planned storyline, but that wasn't REALLY him. That was another character wearing his face tbh. Ok, now this note is getting out of hand. I get so excited to write these little comments! Idk, feels like a footnote or something. I'm Done now.  
> Thanks for reading, and stay safe!


	7. Jane Looks at Herself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sex is mentioned in this chapter (as an idea not in a scene between characters)

Jane was staring at herself in the mirror, past the cobweb cracks and spray paint, not quite picked off. She tried to see her face, her hair, her features as if she were a stranger.

She didn’t do that all the time. She used to hate looking at herself, when everything was just “pretty” and “not pretty”, and she didn’t have the framing to figure which was which. That had been- she must have been twelve. Or thirteen. Hopper’s cabin. She would ran her fingers over the faces of girls in magazines, trying to throw her head back, run her hands through her hair, open her mouth in just the same way.

It was useless. It just wasn’t the same. Her neck bent at a weird angle, her mouth looked gaping and gross. She didn’t know that the girls in the pictures were supposed to be laughing. It just never occurred to her.

Maybe, she wondered, that was what had made her hate Max so much when they first met. Yes, looking at her in the gym, with Mike, she’d noticed, even before the jealousy hit, that Max looked just like those girls. Her hair was thicker, longer, and her face was bright with something that Jane was never able to find when she twisted her lips up and opened her eyes wide.

Max couldn’t believe that, when she finally told her. “You’re the one who could model,” she said, flicking Jane in the arm. “You’ve got that…  _ sultry  _ look.”

“Sultry,” Jane echoed, unsure.

“Uh…” Max had scratched at her head, her eyes straying from Jane’s. “Jeez. I don’t know how to describe it exactly. Sort of… sexy?”

“Sexy,” Jane said. 

Max blushed, making greater effort to look away from Jane. They were sitting in Jane’s room, on her bed, listening to the radio. Max had given up showing Jane how to make a friendship bracelet, and the forgotten tangle of thread was safety-pinned to her jeans. Jane stared at it.

“Yeah, like, attractive.”

“Pretty?”

“Does Hopper not talk to you about this stuff?” Max asked. Her voice squeaked at the edges, and Jane laughed at her. That made Max mad enough to look back at her, but she very quickly became tight-lipped again. 

“He only says,” and here Jane adopted a lower, growlier voice, “ _ be home by seven. Fold your jeans and put them in your drawer. No eggos for dinner. _ ”

“I guess you don’t have school,” Max said, contemplatively. “I guess. No sex education. Well. Ahem. When two people love each other very much… I mean, like… well, yeah, when two people love each other very much, they can have sex to get a baby.”

Jane tried to work this out in her head. “Is it like a sweat?”

“What?”

“Where do they get the baby?”

“The baby grows inside the woman.”

“What woman?”

“The… Crap, I forgot to say that it’s a man and a woman. Uh, a man and a woman have sex, and that makes a baby inside the woman, and then she has to give birth.”

Jane nodded as if she understood. “So we couldn’t have a baby.”

Max stared at her. Jane didn’t know exactly why. She had a weird look in her eyes, like she had just heard something sad. When she looked away, it wasn’t in discomfort.

“No. No babies. But you don’t have to do it to have a baby.”

“Oh?”

“You can just do it because it feels good,” Max said. “And lots of people do it. You shouldn’t even be thinking about babies until you’re twenty five.”

Twenty-five. Jane stored the number in her head for later. “Okay.” She reached over and Max flinched, full-bodied. Jane narrowed her eyes at her and started playing with a thread. “You don’t like sex?”

“It’s not fun to talk about.”

“Only fun to do?” Jane held the thread up so she could see how it twisted into a tiny rope. “Have you had sex?”

“What?” Max said, and jumped a little bit further from Jane. A second ago, their shoulders had been touching, and now there was practically enough space for another person. “No! Sex is for when you’re old. Like, eighteen.”

Eighteen years old. Jane looked at herself in the mirror.

She wasn’t fourteen anymore. It was obvious. Max looked mostly the same these days, but Jane knew she’d changed. Her hair was longer, long enough to thread her fingers in properly. Her face was more slender, her jaw less round. Her boobs had come in.

She was pretty, she thought. Not that Mike would ever say that.

Mike was never going to call her sexy. He stumbled over “beautiful”, like it was some obligation. He shied away from the word “sex” like it was a cuss.

Eighteen. Right. She wondered if Max had waited that long.

“Jane,” Max said, as she came in. Jane wished she’d had some warning- she realized that she was practically pressed nose to nose with her reflection. “Taking a last look?”

“It’ll grow back,” Jane said, darkly. The words were Max’s, spoken a few hours ago when she’d first suggested this. Max made a humming, almost-laugh sound.

She’d shaved her head. Not all the way, but close. She’d said that red hair was too conspicuous, and she wanted it boy-short. Jane privately thought she looked like a lab experiment. Number Twelve, maybe. Or Thirteen, or Twenty, or Fifty-fucking-Million. Who knew how many after her? If Papa was still alive-

“Jane.”

Jane scowled at her, even though she’d been the one spaced out. She took the scissors that Max handed, and cut without looking at her reflection.

She kept it longer than Max’s, just below her ears. Max brushed clumps of it into the sink for her. Her touch was light. Jane could barely even feel it.

“You look good with short hair,” Max said, casually. It was fake-casual, but Jane recognized it.

“Yeah,” Jane said. She knew that. Mike probably preferred her like that, with her hair short enough to be a guy’s. It was just about those magazines, which she barely even cared about anymore. Or having it long enough for Max to braid. Pretty hair.

But it would grow back. And she didn’t even care, not really. No, not at all. She faced her own reflection, and pretended to recognize her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well... sorry about this chapter. Trying not to get down on myself these days but its... lowkey dumb? maybe ill rewrite later.  
> Trying to write a fun and flirty road trip romance and i keep getting caught up in weird little moments. Idk idk idk.  
> I wasnt going to update today, but this is an unusually short chapter and they announced filming was starting so why not! this starts the second part of this story, which will be largely concerned with road tripping. I swear. More cars less hair and angst. can't wait!  
> thanks for reading, and stay safe!


	8. Mike Is Interrogated

Mike wasn’t drunk, per se, but he was certainly not sober. 

He didn’t know why (he hadn’t drunk that much, he was sure. Half-sure, at least) and, while it was better than being hungover for this particular event, it wasn’t the greatest by a long shot.

What Will and El and everyone tended to misinterpret about Mike was that he didn’t actually enjoy being drunk. He hated being discoordinated, hated the taste, hated the headaches and nausea that came afterward. All he was chasing was inhibition.

Total inhibition. When he was younger, Mike had decided that being drunk was an excuse to say whatever you wanted, do whatever you wanted. He imagined the day he would finally sneak some of his dad’s liquor down into the basement, and he and his friends would drink it together, and then…

And then what? Even now, he couldn’t exactly describe why he wanted that so badly.

Anyway, they  _ had _ technically gotten drunk together. They’d end up at the same parties, though sometimes Dustin wouldn’t come because he wasn’t invited and Will wouldn’t come because he was working, or because he didn’t like the people there. El sometimes came, but she told him that she despised the way he acted when he was intoxicated. Like that, exactly. “I despise it, Mike.”

And Mike had said, “wow, been reading the dictionary?”

In any case, he’d never been totally out of control. It was disappointing. He would try drugs, but even he could tell that was going a little too far, and he realized that his hold on  _ things _ was tenuous.  _ Things _ included everything and anything. People. Just the two. 

Sometimes, though, he knew that he had never really had a hold on them. Not since he was thirteen, after El had finally come back and Will had gone back to normal, and he had them both exactly where he wanted them.

There was a banging noise, and Mike sat up. He was in a van- yes, focusing on the present was better- alone. He was handcuffed to this little metal table, which was weird (table in a van?) and there didn’t seem any immediate way to free himself from this predicament, so he sat completely still as someone climbed into the van.

He recognized him immediately (the hair, it was, completely snowy white, even whiter than his grandma’s (did old people get competitive about white hair? Like oh, Jenny, you old bat, with that stringy head of grey hair (NO, FOCUS, NOW))). His brain caught up just as he started speaking.

“Micheal,” he said. “My name is Dr. Brenner. Do you remember me?”

“I remember you being a bitch,” Mike said. This was the first thing that came to mind, and it didn’t come out quite as badass as in his head.

“I’m sure you’re confused.”

Mike nodded, coolly. His next move was going to be not responding to anything that Brenner said, as one did under interrogation.

“I want you to know that you and your friend will not be hurt,” Brenner said. “We simply want to ask you some questions about your girlfriend.”

It sounded weird for the man who had kept Eleven like a prisoner for years refer to her as Mike’s girlfriend. Honestly, girlfriend had always been a strange word to associate with El. When he was younger, he had decided it was because their bond was just so strong that it didn’t seem to fit.

“When was the last time you saw Eleven?” Brenner asks.

“Who says I have to answer that?” Mike said, defiantly breaking his silence.

Brenner smiled, gently. His hands were folded on the table, and he looked like a professor, or someone in a quiet kind of authority. Mike’s first instinct, admittedly, was to trust him. 

“No one is here to make you do anything,” Brenner said. “However, we believe that Eleven is unsafe, and-”

“If she’s hiding, she’s hiding from  _ you _ ,” Mike said. “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”

Brenner nodded, looking as if he expected this. 

“I know you believe I’m some kind of monster.”

_ Monster _ . That word had a lot of meaningful connotation, and Mike wondered if Brenner knew any of it. 

“However, all of the things I did for Eleven were for her own good, and for the good of the world. I’m sure you know better than anyone that Eleven’s powers can be volatile. Dangerous, even.”

Mike shook his head, even though he did know that (and he had seen it, and he remembered it. Chapped-lipped and trembling, watching her tearing everything down in front of him).

“I never meant to hurt her. But she’s hurt herself, and others, through her actions. Do you understand that we couldn’t have a little girl running around melting people’s brains?”

“You experimented on her,” Mike said. “She was your little science experiment.”

“Interesting you should say that.” Brenner smiled, kindly. “Do you believe that?”

The confusion of Mike’s brain flirted with the idea that Brenner could see right through him, into him, and  _ knew _ exactly what he thought of Eleven. That was impossible, though. He didn’t, and couldn’t know, and those were thoughts he only really let leak through the cracks in the dead night, alone.

“Of course not,” Mike said.

“But you can understand that precautions were necessary.”

“Were you even listening to me? They weren’t precautions, they were-”

“Have you ever considered the idea that Eleven lied to you?” Brenner asked.

Mike snorted, and said, very truthfully, “your people have pointed guns at me before. I understand where she’s coming from.”

Brenner hummed; in affirmation, Mike supposed, since he couldn’t exactly deny that claim. Then, he said, neutrally, “we have reports that Eleven has chosen Maxine Mayfield as her getaway driver.”

Mike raised his eyebrows. He couldn’t help it. He hadn’t thought about Max in a long time. As with all his old friends, she occurred to him infrequently, and often in the backdrop of the nightmare fuel that had been his pre-teen years. But she had been  _ there _ , too. That blistering summer where everything changed. 

“So?” Mike asked.

“That seems to surprise you,” Brenner said.

“It doesn’t. They’re friends.”

This just slipped out, and Mike was angry at himself, but he wasn’t sure it was something Brenner could use against him or El. 

“So it’s not-”

There was a gunshot from outside.

They both startled, Mike’s mind sluggishly leaping from thought to thought- Eleven? Hopper, maybe? He had assumed they had driven him somewhere, after he’d been knocked out, but maybe they were just in the forest and someone knew where he was, and they were coming to save him.

Brenner stood up, abruptly, and stepped cautiously towards the door. From outside, there was a guttural scream, from a man. A confused shout, another gunshot. Mike saw Brenner reach into his coat with one hand, and towards the door handle with the other.

He slid the door open, fast, and stepped out of the vehicle. Mike rounded the table, his wrists still secured, and finally caught sight of the commotion.

There was a girl standing in a clearing, someone disappointingly unfamiliar. She held a gun out straight in front of her, and had it pointed to Brenner, who was pointing his own towards her.

“You wouldn’t kill a precious commodity,” she said, in a vaguely british accent. 

“And you don’t want to kill me,” Brenner said, rather calmly for the situation he was currently in. He gave her that slow, kind smile, and Mike swore he saw her tighten her finger on the trigger.

A van’s engine roared from nearby, and one peeled in out of absolutely nowhere. Mike heard it thump audibly over a body, before it skidded to a stop just long enough for Brenner to climb inside it.

The girl shot her gun, and missed. The van sped away.

“Fuck!” the girl said, seemingly to herself, and then she looked up towards him.

Mike tried to put his hands up, but the chain restrained him. “Don’t shoot!” he said, instead.

She frowned, and crossed the clearing towards him. “Mike Wheeler?” she said. 

“Maybe,” he said, stupidly.

“Friends with Will Byers?” she said.

So Will was safe. That was a relief- he wasn’t sure exactly how he would have swung a rescue. He nodded, and she climbed inside.

“I’ll shoot your handcuffs off,” she said.

“You don’t need to do that,” he squeaked, though he wasn’t sure how he’d get out of here otherwise.

She fixed him with a glare, and held it for five menacing seconds. Then, she stepped away from his table.

“There,” she said.

Mike lifted his hands, and realized that the chain had been broken, giving him back his movement. He looked up at her. “How did you do that?”

She scowled, and reached up to smear away her nosebleed. “How do you think?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay i am on thanksgiving break so i'm going to try and bingewatch all three seasons of stranger things again which is definitely going to have some effect on this story (probably because i MAJORLY freewheel it with characterization so actually watching them talk and interact is going to be like ohhh so i've been writing this character totally wrong). We shall see. Also, Mike pov! It took me a really long time bc honestly i don't really know what it's like in mike's head? I just tried to imbue him with the 'gay but pretending i'm not gay' feelings from my middle school days and bam here we go.   
> Thank you so much for reading, and stay safe!


	9. Max Is Very Calm

“You’re quiet,” Max said, after the fourth time that Jane had reached over and pointedly switched off the radio. “As in, you are subjecting to me to silence today.”

“I can’t focus when it’s playing,” Jane murmured. She bent lower over her book, because suddenly Jane had a book. Max definitely had never seen it before, and yet it had been entirely occupying her attention for the last three hours.

She was pretty sure the book had entered their lives during the second gas station they’d gone to that morning. The first had inspired Max to suggest cutting their hair, which they’d done quickly in a slimy bathroom, but the second had been hours later. Neither Jane nor Max had wanted to stop to sleep for the night, terror helping them stay awake for hours, but they’d needed to stop in the morning to replace the thoughts of the horrifying ways they’d be dissected by the labcoats if they caught them with sugar to keep them from crashing. They bought coffees and slurpees and tiny donuts with powdered sugar. Max had held up a box of eggos and asked Jane if she wanted one, and Jane threw a keychain at her head.

While Max had filled up the gas tank, Jane had gone to the bathroom, and they’d gotten in the car, and Jane had pulled out the book and started reading.

“Remind me again where you got that?” Max asked, groping for a cup with some kind of caffeine and coming up with a melted blue slurpee. “Was it one of those magical-book-sends-reader-on-magical-adventure things? I feel like you’d get mixed up in that.”

“You watch too many movies,” was Jane’s explanatory response.

Max stared out the front window. The highway was glorious, a black mark cut through the pale grass and dark green trees. The sky had gone buttery as the sun rose, and Max had felt incredibly lucky to be able to witness it until she remembered the circumstances of this fun little road trip.

“I’m so bored,” Max said, as a lone car passed them. It felt, for stretches at a time, that they were the only ones on the road today. It was a little freaky to think that they’d see the vans from miles away before they were caught; Max couldn’t stop checking her rearview mirrors, certain that she’d see them on their tail. “Jane. If you’re going to turn my music off, at least read out loud to me.”

“No,” Jane snapped, which Max probably should’ve expected.

“At least tell me what you’re reading.”

“Shakespeare,” Jane said, so deadpan that Max thought she was joking.

“Any good?”

“It’s confusing.”

“Are you actually reading Shakespeare?” Max asked, and she looked over to catch Jane’s terse nod. “Holy shit! Where the fuck did you find a book of Shakespeare? In the toilet?”

Jane pushed her hair out of her face, but it was so short now it fell out from behind her ear. She scowled, and Max got that funny, fourteen-year-old feeling. “It was on top of the dumpster,” Jane said.

“So is just one play, or-”

“It’s called  _ Romeo and Juliet _ .”

“I think I read that for school,” Max said, thinking hard. Junior English, maybe?

“You read  _ Much Ado About Nothing _ ,” Jane said, still without looking up. “It was a comedy.”

“Right,” Max said, not remembering. “So  _ Romeo and Juliet  _ is a tragedy then? Why read it?”

“It was the most interesting out of the shelf of out back of the dumpster,” Jane said.

“You’re so moody.”

“You’re so nosy.”

Max huffed and tried to refocus. It was pretty, but this was mind-numbing without music. “Pay attention to me,” she begged. “Entertain me. Jaaaane.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Sing me a song. Play a road game. We’ve got hours to go before we sleep, and all that.”

Jane gave an exaggerated sigh, snapped her book shut, and then opened it up to the first page. “Two households both alike in dignity-”

“Wait, wait, give me context!” Max said, already delighted. Jane never read aloud, usually too embarrassed to let Max hear her mispronounce words. Maybe her opinion of her had fallen so incredibly low that she no longer cared what she thought. “What is going on?”

“You don’t get context.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you were watching the play you wouldn’t get context.”

“Isn’t there any- aren’t there stage notes?” Max said, proud to remember the word. Maybe Junior English had not been a waste.

Jane squinted at the book. “Enter Chorus.”

“Why can’t we do something actually fun?” Max asked. “Like road games. Let’s play a road game.”

“But I’m reading.”

“Can we not fight? We have a long way to go.”

“You’re fighting with me!” Jane exclaimed, waving her book to emphasize. “Let me read in peace!”

“I’m bored, and I’m driving!”

“That’s not my fault.”

“It sort of is!”

Max could see Jane puffing up to make another argument, but her eye caught on the rear-view mirror and- there it was. 

“Jane!” she said, and something about her voice must have been obvious because Jane flipped in her seat. For a moment, the rumble of the car and their breathing was the only sound.

“It could just be a white car,” Jane said, much more calmly than Max felt.

“Do you want to take that risk?”

“I want to calm down. You  _ need _ to calm down.” Jane slid back down, facing the right way this time, and closed her eyes. 

Max’s hands were shaking on the steering wheel. “Jane.”

“Be quiet,” Jane said.

“Jane!” 

“If you want me to flip it then CALM THE FUCK DOWN,” Jane said. 

Max took short, unsteady breaths. She was right. She had Jane on her side- and Jane could flip vans, even if they were the van they were looking for. Of course, it wouldn’t really matter if Jane could flip the van if the van pulled up alongside and someone stuck a gun out-

To top it off, their gas tank was running low, and Max wasn’t sure if it was more important to try gunning it and getting away, or going at a steady pace and, if they survived, getting to the next gas station. 

She checked her back mirror. Definitely a white van, definitely speeding closer. She wished she wasn’t driving this fucking car so she could close her eyes and take a deep breath. Would she rather die in a car crash or at the behest of murderous evil scientists who had created her superweapon best friend?

Max pressed a little harder on the gas pedal, but the van was coming up fast. She checked Jane, who still had her eyes closed and her mouth pressed into a thin line. What was going through her head? Combo moves for car destruction?

She could  _ hear  _ the van approaching, and she was pressing down so hard on the gas pedal her foot was aching. Her hands hurt too, from clenching the wheel. Her whole body was like a wound spring, and she was creaking with the effort of concentrating her being into being ready-

The van pulled past them, and Max caught a look at the floppy-eared beagle with his head stuck out the passenger window. 

It was surreal. Beagle in the front seat, the outline of a carseat in the backseat. The back window had a faded “Baby on Board” sign in it.

Max wheezed, and then started to laugh. Jane opened her eyes.

“What?” she asked, reaching over to take her arm. “What is it?”

“They have a baby on board,” Max said, and then began fully cackling, head thrown back, limbs shaking with the movement of it. After a moment, Jane joined in, and they laughed for a good minute, hysteria from a near-miss making everything so goddamned funny that Max was delirious with it.

When she stopped, sighing and wiping her eyes, Jane was laying against the seat as if infinitely weary.

“I’m so glad it wasn’t them,” Jane said, her voice shaking the tiniest bit. “I wasn’t ready to kill them. I couldn’t have done it.”

This was a sobering thought, and one Max wasn’t sure she was ready to have. She could feel Jane cracking, slightly, next to her, and she reached over to touch her, the way Jane had when she had first started laughing. It was the kind of casual affection they hadn’t had for so long, but it come so naturally here, despite their fight.

“Let’s read some fucking Shakespeare,” she said. 

Jane fished the thin book from the space between the seat and the car door. “Let’s read some fucking Shakespeare.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah it's been like two days but i get all freaked out when i have an unpublished chapter sitting there in my drive idk. so here we are. yes romeo and juliet will be coming back and being important bc idk love/a theater bitch is writing this.  
> the next chapter miiiight be will and it also could be robin? me and the outline and going through a rocky patch rn.  
> thanks for reading and stay safe!!!


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